It's A Wonderful Life...

I get into stints like this, where I'll dig out a bunch of movies from my collection of dozens upon dozens of videotapes, hundreds even, and either revisit flicks I've only seen once many years ago, or recorded off TV years ago but never got around to.

And so the latter is the case for It's A Wonderful Life, one of those movies you constantly find on 100 Best lists and so on, and indeed it is bloody good. Mind you, the talking stars/galaxies at the beginning was somewhat WTF in nature, and the sheer volume of cinema-rule-bothering jump cuts in the second half was astonishing.

But bloody good it is nonetheless, and who couldn't love Jimmy Stewart as the forever giving George Bailey, for whom life always gets in the way of his personal dreams of international travel and skyscrapers. Also, it's nowhere near as depressing as I was expecting it to be, it's all pretty cheery stuff until the last half hour when it all truly goes tits up for George, and while as we all know his problems are resolved joyously, I was left hanging to see that grumpy old bastard and nemesis of common decency, Potter, get his dues - but clearly it was never going to fit in to the last half hour...still though, it's a cheering and enduring classic.

So what next on my plough through my old videotapes to watch movies I've still not seen? High Sierra probably, then either Murder Inc. or a documentary on Bogart himself - although the latter two I might have seen back when I recorded them, but for the life of me I can't remember whether I did or didn't for both of them. So aye, High Sierra methinks.

Mind you, I've got the boxset of Series 1 through 3 of Bo Selecta! coming soon (cheap-as-chips it was too), so after having had a run through the entire back catalogue of Red Dwarf episodes, as well as season 5 of The A-Team, in recent lunch-times and empty evenings, I'll have hours of rubber-faced rudeness to chuckle heartily too. It's certainly been a long while since I watched it though, and while it will no doubt retain it's power to make me cackle with laughter, I wonder if it'll be as funny as it was back in the day ... especially when many of the skits were 'of their time'.

...

And just to put your minds to rest, I'm not just lazing about, the editing for that sexual education DVD is well underway ... in fact there'll be some filming to do for that in the next couple of weeks. We've got to get all the necessary talking head stuff before the students go off on their summer holidays, throughout which they'll probably do what most 16 to 18 year olds do ... drink plenty of cheap booze and cider, toke and lie around. They might as well enjoy it now, because immediately after the real world comes along and teabags you into a perpetual state of furious anger at the blithering idiots in Number 10.

What was I on about again? Oh yeah ... It's A Wonderful Life ... well, some of the time anyway.